I've got a few more pieces of news to share. As you might gather, since I've changed the name of my blog, I now have a title!
Fearless: The Making Of Post-Rock.
Graham Sutton designed the cover. Being a great admirer of the Bark Psychosis artwork, I was delighted when he agreed to do it. Isn't it grand? The orange/green bits will look very orange/green, my name and the subtitle is in silver, and there will be some fancy technique I don't understand used for texture. Basically it will stand out on the bookshelves so even people going into Waterstones for a Peter James novel won't be able to resist it.
There are seventeen chapters, plus an introduction. I conducted forty-two new interviews for it. There are 129,268 words in the main text body (9,268 more words than I was contracted for, you lucky people). There'll be about fifty pictures in it, including rare flyers and posters, and many previously-unpublished photos. I completed my draft in the middle of November, I got an edited version back just before Christmas, and today I've finished my final version of it - taking out the odd libelous statement (!) and adding in clarifications and corrections.
I named it Fearless because that's the overwhelming attitude I found among the music and the people that I interviewed. The Making Of bit was a later addition and took a while to form, but it refers to the
fact that I've not only written on things usually tagged 'post-rock'. but taken
a wider approach (readers of this blog will be familiar with this, e.g. unpicking the influence of the Cocteau Twins); it also covers the idea that post-rock, as a genre, was
'made' - constructed, de-constructed and re-shaped over a lengthy time period.
I'm happy with my writing, I think, although I know I'm still too close to it and it's spattered with afterbirth. The real test will be next week, when I try to read it 'as a book' for the first time without my metaphorical red pen to hand.
Psychologically, though, it's tough. You know in Trainspotting, where Renton is trying to explain what heroin is like and basically says 'when you're on smack you only have to think about smack, you don't have to care about not having a girlfriend or some shite football team that always loses'? That's what writing a book, to me, feels like too. It's gone, and suddenly now I have to worry about my tax return and moving house and Brexit and Trump and whether others will like it and have I run out of tea bags and I really should have called that person back and so on. The world is more fearful as I leave Fearless than when I entered it.
Thanks for reading this blog up till now. It really helped me to extrapolate some key ideas which I used (or built upon) in the book. In the months to come I'll post a few teasers for Fearless, and share some of the masses of extra information I accrued that, for one reason or another, didn't make the final version.
I’m right in the very middle of my book.
How do I feel? Like Macbeth, where he fancies himself in a vast reservoir of
blood, and he concludes that going back is as horrifying as going on.
Yep, writing books is a lot like committing
regicide.
I suppose the good news is that, were I to
drown in said crimson reservoir, half of the thing is done so at least a partial version of the book could emerge, as
if it were a sketchy Tupac Shakur release.
This post is really simply to let everyone
know two things:
1.I’ve got a title and I think I’ve got a subtitle too (pending
another contretemps with my editor
about it, of course). Revealed shortly.
2.The book is due out March 2017.
Currently, I’m deep into writing about the
early-mid 90s British post-rock scene. I’ve got a trilogy of chapters on it. I think I’m achieving what I set out to
do: getting people’s stories out, retaining their voices, while pinning down
wider trends. I'll keep this short, since I better save my words – 1,200 of the bastards, every day – for the main
event. Still, like one of those underwhelming Simpsons clip show episodes, I thought it might be nice - since I'm here - to share four videos of the period I’m
currently writing about. Comments from my interviewees for context.
Keep well in these horrible times.
Insides, ‘Distractions’
‘We had an incredibly unpleasant couple of
days doing that bit with stop-motion. There was a yellow paint we were using.
We looked at the bottle. It said, “agent for cancer”.’ Kirsty Yates
Moonshake, ‘Capital Letters’
‘Me and my girlfriend Kate lived on this
big council estate, at the end of Hackney Downs, in these five massive
towerblocks. Twenty-one floors high, and it really was kind of Escape From New York. Kate was at home
once, she looked out of the window, she heard this crack, a really loud bang,
and suddenly someone had jumped off, there was this tomato splattered on the
ground below. There was another time when there was this spate of burglaries,
people would edge round the two-inch concrete strip round the side of this
block and break in through the balconies. And people would fall off. That
happened once, as well. I got chased into the lift and just managed to close
the doors before a gang of kids mugged me. But we decided to film a video on
this estate. All the kids came over and asked what we were doing. One of these
little kids said, “what are you filming it here for?” and Julie [director] said,
“it looks good on the camera” and showed him the playback, and he said, “my
estate looks cool!” David Callahan
Seefeel, ‘Industrious’ (Live at Britronica,
Moscow)
‘We got there and we got picked up and
driven from the airport through, probably about fifty miles of monolithic tower
blocks, what a place, blimey this is grim. In fact, as soon as we got to the
airport they were having to bribe people to get trolleys so we could get our
gear off the airport and into the van.’ Sarah
Peacock
Bark Psychosis, ‘Big Shot’ (Live at
Britronica, Moscow)
‘First and last time I’ve been to Moscow. It
was an absolute fucking nightmare.’ Graham
Sutton
Gary McKendry (Papa Sprain): I grew up in
the suburbs outside Belfast. Early music in the house was stuff like Miles
Davis’s Sketches of Spain and Bitches Brew, also Buddy Rich, and Max
Roach. I discovered the hi-fi pretty early as a child, and used to sit in the
living room with headphones on listening to any cassettes close to hand, stuff
like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and Yellow Submarine; Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, or it might
have been Greatest Hits. Dvořák’s ‘New World Symphony’; and
the Jacques Loussier Trio Play Bach
or some such… whilst the rest of my family sat nearby eating dinner and
watching the television.
Joe Cassidy (Butterfly Child): There’s a very
silly story behind Butterfly Child. When I was about six years old, we moved
into this old house that everybody in the neighbourhood thought was haunted. It
had very long grass. Literally, way higher than I was, as a kid. It was a weird
imaginary place for a few months, until my mum and dad got it cleared up. But I
would go out into the garden and write these little stories as a kid. And one
of the stories I wrote was called ‘Butterfly Child’.
GM: I was in bands with schoolfriends,
practicing mostly Joy Division covers.
JC: I was absolutely obsessed with Peter
Hook and New Order, and Joy Division. So for a birthday present my mum and dad
bought me a bass guitar. And I started working and writing, and I’d save up all
my money, and I’d rent out a four-track recorder.
GM: It wasn’t until I met Joe Cassidy, when
I was around 16 or so, that I really even considered writing my own material.
JC: I was working a lot with Gary McKendry,
because we were very close friends.
GM: It finally must have been, age 17,
[when I] formed a band with myself as singer/guitarist, Richard Reynolds on
guitar, and Cregan Black playing bass. We did the odd gig in Belfast but the
process was more around solo four-track demo recording, so we would only
rehearse if a gig was about to happen.
JC: I weirdly met some people who were part
of the Manchester scene, but who were over in Belfast. And I got pulled into
their band, and they ended up getting signed to a major record label deal. I
asked my mum if I should do it and she said, ‘son, you can do it if you want
to, but maybe what you should do is finish school and then write your own stuff
and be your own boss.’ So I quit that band.
GM: There were no opportunities really in
Belfast. No scenes, or at least not when I was growing up. No record companies
really, no nothing.
JC: By the time I got into my teens, there
was no question that there was a very foreboding quality to Belfast. It was
lovely, it was full of lovely people, but there was a dichotomy. It was a very
poetic, lovely lifestyle but also very dangerous and violent. And I think music
was a really good escape from that.
GM: After my A-Levels, I went to London to
do a degree in joint English and History at the only college that would take
me, because I had spent much too much more time teaching myself guitar and
listening to records than properly studying like I should have been.
JC: I finished school, and I’d been doing a
lot of demos. Probably around the time I was 16 or 17, I started going ‘I’m gonna
do some shows’. I was very shy and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I
said, ‘it’s got to have a band name’. All my friends at the time were complete
intellectual snobs. And they had bands like The Freudian Complex, just
ridiculous names. So I thought, screw all that. [I wanted to name it] the most
innocent, naïve thing; something from my childhood, even though it’s the worst
band name of all time. I thought, ‘I’ll call it Butterfly Child’.
GM: I was a very big A.R.Kane fan. I actually
thought they were the coolest band in the universe.
JC: I was in this weird space, where I was
like, ‘I don’t want to work with anybody unless it’s A.R. Kane or The Cocteau
Twins or whatever’.
Rudy Tambala (A.R. Kane): We were sick of the whole
fucking industry after the second album. [A.R. Kane] had all happened so
quickly, and we just kept doing it, and doing it. And it got to the point where
we just weren’t enjoying it very much anymore.
Melody
Maker, A.R. Kane “i"
review: Truth is, we’d run out of words for A.R. Kane. Their ecstatic hails
of sculpted, bittersweet feedback, their oceanic drift, their
Madonna-in-a-blizzard songs prompted a sandstorm of adjectives.
RT: We were going around with lots and lots
of different ideas [on “i"], and
not wanting to be contained. I think that in retrospect – which is great, isn’t
it? – we probably could have done with a manager. Someone to say, ‘stop’.
Someone stop us, because we’re spending all the money, and we’re just having a
laugh.
Melody
Maker, A.R. Kane “i" review: And it’s at least 90 per
cent brilliant.
Alex
Ayuli, the other half of A.R. Kane, moved to America following the release of “i".
RT: Because Alex went away, I had lots of
time on my hands. So I built a studio. In an old building in Stratford we hired
a unit and we built a studio inside that unit. It had a drum room, a vocal
booth. A proper studio. Really beautiful.
GM: Joe got in touch to tell me H.ark! [the name of Rudy's new studio and, eventually, record label] had
put an advert in NME or Melody Maker saying they were looking
for bands to produce, so it was decided I would go along with our demos to play
to them.
JC: Gary, he was very forthright in those
days, and very confident. He met up with Rudy, and played him basically a bunch
of that genius pop music that Gary was making back in those days.
GM: I went to Stratford. Rudy was there and
I had to wait for a bit for the coin to drop that this was the Rudy from the
A.R. Kane, and he was actually gonna listen to my little demos I had recorded in the suburbs outside Belfast
between times spent trying to comprehend what made HIS BAND and HIS RECORDS so
cool. So he listened whilst I sat trying to look nonchalant and I guess he must
have heard the A.R. Kane influences straight away. I mean, one song, ‘I Got
Loose’, was made up from a sample of ‘In A Circle’ from their “i" album!
JC: I think Rudy was floored.
RT: [Gary] knew what he was doing. He was
really quietly spoken, beautiful, a delicate young man. Byronesque or
something. And on the edge.
GM: The name was created for H.ark!, as a
necessity for putting a band name onto records to identify them as my stuff!
When I told Rudy the name of the band he replied in rhyming tones,
‘PA-PA-SPRAIN === A-R-KANE’. He probably figured not only had I ripped him off
musically, but I was now trying to usurp his band name too!
JC: And then, I guess Gary said, ‘oh my
friend Joe’s got a band as well’. And he played that to Rudy and Rudy was like,
‘oh I’ve got two bands here to get started’. It was around 1990 and we jumped
in with Rudy, and very quickly knocked out a couple of EPs. And that’s where
Butterfly Child started.
GM: The first Papa Sprain EP [Flying To Vegas] took about two weeks to
record and mix. The first week was recording, second was mixing. Every track
apart from the title track was new. I was getting more into a sort of ‘let it
happen’ attitude to recording. Maybe, gradually, I was becoming more confident
with what I figured worked. I think this pleased Rudy, and everything flowed
pretty easy. I had started ‘Fizz’ with the guitar alone, but it was difficult
for me to see where to take it. It was sounding quite listless and wimpy, and
then Rudy said I should ‘put a big dirty distorted fuck off bass on top’ so I
recorded the noise bass probably first or second take.Improvised noise bass. Ended up as if
the whole song was built around a bass solo; I was happy with that.
JC: Those first EPs came out and obviously
you had the classic Melody Maker prose.
Everything’s gorgeous. There was definitely some attention around that.
Melody
Maker, Papa Sprain: Flying To Vegas review: The most astonishing debut of the year has
me ransacking my cache of synonyms for ‘iridescent’ and grievously failing to
do the bugger justice.
Melody
Maker, Butterfly Child: Tooth Fairy review: A purely sensuous pleasure, beauty for its own
sake. For those who want to unshackle the surly fetters of reality and take an awayday
from mundanity, it can’t be bettered.
In
the NME ‘On’
[New Bands] section on 14 September 1991, both Butterfly Child and Papa Sprain
were featured, discussing their respective debut H.Ark! EPs.
GM (1991): When I wrote the lyrics, it was
just anything in my head, letting things come out. And if the rhythms seemed OK
and if it wasn’t too pretentious, then I was happy enough.
JC (1991): [The songs] have a dark side to
them. Just mess them up a bit and make them colder: no harder to listen to,
just give them more substance.
GM (1991): Playing live and recording are
totally separate. So many people in bands don’t realise that recording is an
artificial process, they just want a recording of themselves playing live, and
I don’t think it’s about that at all.
GM: Pretty early on I had started thinking
about the difference between improvisation versus structure, and how the two
complimented each other. [I wanted to investigate] what could be done within
that framework, how to explore that space, and how it worked in itself.
JC: I don’t think any of us were trying to
say anything narratively speaking, with lyrics, for example. It was a very
stream of consciousness writing, because I thought that was even more truthful
than writing something down and then trying to make it all make sense. Whatever
came out, came out, and that was the song.
The
next two EPs on H.Ark! were May [Papa Sprain] and Eucalyptus [Butterfly Child], both
released in 1992.
GM: I thought Vegas was too uptempo, and wanted the second EP to be more sombre.
The May EP again took probably about
a fortnight. I vaguely remember arguing with Rudy because he wanted to put a breakbeat
on ‘U Swell’, though only for a bar or two. But I wanted the sound to be more
‘pure’.
RT: [Gary] just made the studio work. He
made a beautiful sound.
GM: I think a lot of other bands hadn’t
given much thought about the studio really as an instrument itself. Maybe other
bands had somehow limited themselves in that regard.
JC:We weren’t trying to become pop stars. We were just trying to
make our music, and we didn’t do a lot of live shows. So there was definitely a
wee bit of mystery going on, and people were very fascinated by what we were
doing.
Melody
Maker, Butterfly Child/Papa Sprain @ Camden Falcon,
live review 1991: You wait three years for a band to take up and renew the dreampop
mantle and two arrive at once. […] Papa Sprain and Butterfly Child have opened
up so many vistas you don’t know where to turn. Their point of no return has
already faded into the distance.
JC: [Live] it was basically Gary, myself,
and our other collaborator, friend, Tony McKeown. We played as Papa Sprain and
then we played as Butterfly Child. Which really freaked out the audience. They
were like, ‘what’s going on here? It’s the same three guys! They’ve just
switched microphones!’
GM: I grew to really hate [touring] more
and more. I just wanted to record really, do what I had always done up to then.
Read, listen and write, record.
RT: I don’t know what it’s like in
Stratford now, but I know what it was like in Stratford then, and basically I
had to have weapons in the studio to protect myself. Really scary. In the
building over the road, it was like hooligans doing all the pirate stations.
They all had gear, they all had equipment, there were a lot of heavy drug
people, heavy football fans doing this stuff all around us and I knew a lot of
them, because I grew up in Stratford, and that’s where most of them were from.
But I did get a phone call from an old mate from school one day, saying
‘they’re coming to get you, they want all your gear.’ And I thought, this is
the time to get out of there.
GM: Geoff Travis [of Rough Trade] was
invited to a ’92 gig at The Borderline. God knows what Geoff Travis was
thinking if he thought Papa Sprain were gonna be any sort of success at that
time from that gig!
JC: I think we just sat down with Geoff, who is
one of the most lovely, educated, coolest guys. He said 'listen, we don’t have a ton of money, but we’ll give you this
amount of money to make a record'.
Gary and I talked, and we thought,
‘well we’ve got a nice sizeable chunk of money here for the kind of music we
want to make, we’ll just go and buy an 8-track, reel-to-reel machine, buy a
couple of extra things like a mic and a DAT player, we’ll set up a studio in
Belfast and we’ll knock out our records at the studio.’
Butterfly Child and Papa Sprain both signed with Travis to Rough Trade.
GM: I think from pretty early on [Rough
Trade] started to see me as a liability. Not necessarily in a bad way, but
think they were aware that I was gradually going off the rails.
RT: I think all of that time when I was
working with other bands, I wasn’t working on my own stuff. [I was] working
with different people, working with people constantly, for about two years. I’d
had enough, and California seemed like a really good prospect.
GM: With most bands, they start off
experimental and end up more commercial. Papa Sprain ended up working the other
way around.
Rudy
Tambala went out to California to join Alex Ayuli; H.Ark! wound up, and the third A.R. Kane album, New Clear Child, was released
in 1994. Both Papa Sprain and
Butterfly Child remained at Rough Trade. Albums were recorded; and one was
never released. But those are other stories for other days.
When you devour as much past and present music press as I do, you get very used to cliché. 'We're just making this album for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it, that's a bonus.' 'Success, it's a double-edged sword.' 'You'll either love it or hate it.' The first two may very well be true, but that last one, generally speaking, isn't. It's just dramatic and/or self-aggrandising sloganeering. Most people get by well enough on a 'meh' for (e.g.) the latest My Morning Jacket album.
Yet there are a few exceptions. Talk Talk are very, very, very loved, almost to the point of
obsession, by a small coterie. That’s not hard to understand. They have many qualities that inspire
devotion: enigma, innovation, rebelliousness, meticulousness.
But hate?
That’s from the NME. (They eventually mitigated that
somewhat and gave it a (7), but still called the album ‘painful’ and ‘pathetic’. It was almost disgustingly disingenuous. It basically said the same as the (0) review did, but through a panicked mist of
‘what if we’re wrong and this is actually pretty good?’).
What did the paper think about Laughing Stock? ‘Unutterably
pretentious and looks over its shoulder hoping that someone will remark on its
“moody brilliance” or some such. It’s horrible.’ The Colour Of Spring? ‘Either Hollis is possessed with an
unbearable naïveté or an overpowering intensity, either he’s laughably
misguided or studiously determined, but there’s really no need for this
cumbersome, allegedly “impressionistic” waffle.’
Yes, the NME hated Talk Talk with a venom usually reserved for war
criminals.
Mark Hollis wasn’t patient with journalists, including – but not limited to – those from the NME. For instance, I feel for Dave Rimmer, of Smash Hits; in a very early interview (August 1982), he gets the
sharp end of Hollis’ tongue after he poses a question about Duran
Duran. Reasonable for Rimmer to ask this: not only were Duran Duran ridiculously massive for the Smash Hits readership at that point (as
irritating as that fact might have been for a young Hollis), but Talk Talk had just been on tour with them. Rimmer,
rather charitably I feel, noted Hollis to be ‘an abrasive character’ and then
amiably gave him space to talk about who he would
like to be compared to: Otis Redding, Bacharach & David, John Coltrane.
Smash
Hits got over the Hollis disdain soon enough,
albeit in a very Smash Hits way
(‘just because Talk Talk look a complete shambles, [it] doesn’t alter the fact
that they have some truly excellent songs’). It was the same story in Q and Vox: largely uncomfortable interviews, while the albums
were reviewed intelligently and positively. And as for Melody Maker, they loved them so much they closed their eyes and
rolled over on their tummy at every release. ‘If music can ever be said to be
confessional and questing, this is it,’ they said of Spirit Of Eden; and ‘Talk Talk are certainly the most individual,
possibly the most important group we have’ closed out their Laughing Stock review.
For a flavour of how Hollis was on
(probably) a good day, consider these two extracts. The first, from Music Box and with director Tim Pope, is
a discussion on Talk Talk videos, with the pair making some very hardcore
honest points (in between the weapons-grade piss-taking). The second is a
candid talking head, from 1998, that suggests perhaps Hollis mellowed a bit
with age, and was – when he didn’t have to do it all the time – keen on exploring
serious points about his music.
All that said, let’s go back to the NME. This is from the 22nd
February 1986, around The Colour Of
Spring.
Unlike with ol’ Dave Rimmer, and your
be-mulleted Music Box host, I have
absolutely no sympathy with Neil Taylor, who conducted this NME interview. He wastes what – in hindsight – was a rare
opportunity. Reading carefully, Hollis was perhaps in talkative mood, because he's volunteering information about his
literary influences and song structures. But bully anyone about their work like this, and they will react accordingly. I'd imagine this interview was at least partly responsible for Hollis being wary and reticent with journalists in the future, and eventually withdrawing altogether.
The empire of the powerful inkies is long
over, of course. NME went free
earlier this year, and Melody Maker –
remembered by my interviewees as ‘the better one’, where you might see The
Young Gods or AR Kane on the cover – folded in 2000. Melody Maker became sneering and virtually unreadable towards the
end and, interestingly, one of their parting shots was to review Kid A in a very similar way to how the NME received Spirit Of Eden.
Of course, criticising the work – and
calling Hollis, or Yorke, or whoever,
out for acting like a dickhead – is essential. It’s no good to have a bland
mush where ‘they tried their best, so let’s be nice’. But if you are prejudiced
toward an artist to such an extent that you compromise the entire structure of
an interview or fill up a lengthy review with unsubstantiated bile, then you
are in the wrong job, and time is unlikely to look kindly upon you.
One of the major structural decisions I made
over the summer AND YES THESE ARE ALL AGREED WITH MY EDITOR WHO SAYS THEY
AREN’T is to end my book in 2001. There are a few reasons for this (and I’ll
reveal some at a later date) but my resolution also tallies well with the seismic changes
in the consumption of music and the democratization of recording that occurred
in the noughties. It’s always nice to neatly sidestep a squirming and squealing
can of worms.
The 90s were boom years for physical
product, and for the independently-minded (in [post-rock], that’s pretty much everyone), this often meant insisting on a firm link between aesthetics and
music. Many designed their own iconic covers; some went even further. I had a very
agreeable chat with Jeff Mueller (Rodan, June Of 44, Shipping News) the other
week and, among the music natter, I also found out that he was a letterpress
practitioner, something dating from the first June Of 44 album.
I was looking for ways to package my music that were interesting, and
less plastic-y, I guess. I liked the idea of a paper, or cardboard, package, on
recycled stuff. […] I felt that when you got that first Tortoise record, when
you got Shellac’s At Action Park, or
when you got the first Rachel’s record, it was packaged in something that was
so careful, and so conceived, and so realised, I felt that might inform how you
might open it up and listen to it.
This set me off thinking about formatting
more generally and, in particular, about the sequence of Tortoise 12”s released
in 1996. Anyone who frequented independent record shops that year is sure to
remember their die-cut yellow splendour. Interestingly, prior to then, most of
the Tortoise singles had been 7”s and the first two, especially, fit in with
the US underground aesthetic of the time – coloured vinyl, wraparound
poly-bagged sleeves, retro-tinged artwork. The difference between their first
single, and the Djed/Tjed 12”, is acute.
Each of these 12”s offered
subtle-to-radical reworkings of tracks on Millions
Now Living Will Never Die, or newexplorations,
often in collaboration with more electronica-identified artists whom they
strongly admired. Putting this material only
on a 12” – there were none of the usual accompanying CD singles – seemed to
be making a statement about the group’s current ambition and, perhaps more
pertinently, what they didn’t want to
be identified with.
In my efforts to understand the 12” in this
context, I recalled listening to this somewhat rambling documentary on the 12”
single. Yes, it’s got everyone’s favourite rent-a-bitter-quote Paul Morley
‘presenting’ and self-aggrandizing, but the standard of punditry is high – Tom
Moulton, Lucy O’Brien, some bloke who presses 12”s – and Morley generally lets
them witter on nicely. One line from it, early on, really remained
with me: Morley says to a somewhat piqued New Order that they’ve made a single
(1983’s ‘Blue Monday’, natch) with ‘a prog rock length…’ *pregnant pause, as
Sumner et al seethe through the radio
silence* ‘…which is also the perfect length for a disco track.’
I don’t think Ver Orderreally forgave him, judging by how swiftly they moved on to talking
about the record sleeve, but Morley made a good point, and I found it floating
up in my head when thinking about Tortoise, and the associations of the 12”
single. The links with prog are for another time, but many of the tracks are long, and
unless an artist is particularly keen on the James Brown-ish ‘Part One’ / ‘Part
Two’ of a 7” (and happy to put up with the inferior sound quality), or has a
track that’s even too long for one 12” (Four Tet’s ‘Thirtysixtwentyfive’,
Insides’ ‘Clear Skin’), it’s the obvious route. The 12” single, with its rich history in mixing, scratching, disco, dub, and 80s pop remixes offered – above all else
– space. Quite literally. Grooves
were wider: tracks could not only be lengthier, but bigger in sound, offering
greater scope for extremes and subtleties of antagonism, fragility, tension and
bliss. And let’s not forget that the visual canvas of the 12", whether busy or stark, offered way more impact.
I got excited by my emergent little theory, and
I probably expected Ian Crause to say something fitting it when I asked him why
Disco Inferno released a series of 12" EPs in the early 1990s. After all, they have (albeit retrospectively) been afforded a consistency similar to those Tortoise 12”s: collated as The 5 EPsand the subject of a Pitchfork oral history.
In fact, Crause told me, yes artwork was extremely important to DI, but the formatting was largely
practical. Because the band had amassed a lot of material during the period
late ’91–early ’92 (when DI regrouped, and drastically changed their sound), EPs
were a good way to keep the momentum flowing and increase anticipation for the
forthcoming album. But after DI Go Pop,
it was a different story. Crause says
Everyone expected DI Go Pop
to be a critical hit and get us an audience, which it didn't, so Geoff [Travis, of Rough Trade]
suggested holding off on the next album and making more singles for a year or
so. […] Of course from the point of view of record labels, an EP is far cheaper
to make and promote than an album, which is a far larger undertaking.
The lesson with [post-rock],
again and again, and even with something as seemingly innocuous as formatting: enjoy
constructing theories, but never, ever,
make assumptions. I lovewriting this book.
I have a theory, concocted with my dear
friend Nik, that how we are as a teenager is how we are. We might (might!) get better at moderating the outer
excesses; we don’t feel things less floridly.
Hence this summer. The summer where I may
as well have been that creature above again, watching Why Don’t You? and shoplifting, for all the work I’ve
done. (I’ve actually spent quality time with boyfriend, friends, cats, The Age Of Innocence, Dragons' Den, Demi Lovato’s ‘Cool For The Summer’, prosecco, Sunn O))), London parks, and the urge to give
up veganism). For me, there’s something about August that says laze and laze
some more; I remember one year I desperately tried to get into the Ryder Cup
rather than do anything productive.
Part of the reason for the [post-rock] lull
was a natural rhythm change. As I mentioned before, I’ve consciously tackled
this book differently to Seasons They
Change; I’m trying not to interview people haphazardly, but instead figure
out patterns, see how people knew one another, work out the different factors
and dynamics in and between individual groups and ‘scenes’. In July I felt the
bulk of my British interviews of the late 80s and early 90s were in the bag –
although transcribing them is a different matter entirely – and I’d done a shitload of
research on the influences that fed into [post-rock], as my blog posts up to
this point testify. I’d also made some strong decisions as to the shape of my
book: moving away from a strictly linear approach into something organised more thematically.
Didn’t I deserve a break of a few weeks? Wouldn’t it improve the book if I did so?
As Nicki Minaj says, playtime is over, motherfuckers! I’m listening to Goodbye Enemy
Airship The Landlord Is Dead and getting my head back in the game. North
American [post-rock]: I’m coming for you.
A phrase from my last blog post has
properly bothered me over this past couple of weeks.
It utilised a
similar painstaking but punishing guitar deconstruction (which in itself had
forbears in the Sonic Youth of Evol and
Bad Moon Rising), balanced with a
dour jazzy syncopation, and punctuated by whispery introspection.
‘Guitar deconstruction’. I know what I’m
getting at with it, but it reads to me now as clunky shorthand, without
adequate contextualisation. (This is the reality of being a writer. If all the
usual life horrors aren’t enough, you get this shit waking you at four AM).
I think
I meant that the bands I was discussing – Slint, and Sonic Youth especially
– radically changed the parameters of the guitar, but not through accepted
channels or gimmicks such as making it faster, slower, louder, fiddling with
tunings and guitar effects, etc etc. They may very well have employed any or
all of these techniques, but it was
more in their philosophical attitude to the instrument. They took apart –
deconstructed – its usual ‘rock’ purpose but they did not destroy it. They sought
change it at its very root. The music that emerged was, at least partly, an
inevitable consequence of this attitude. It’s linked to what Simon Reynolds
talked of in his original definition of post-rock: that the guitar was used to
facilitate texture and timbre. Reynolds cited Sonic Youth as a key example of
how the guitar was un-rocked, and
this Wire essay by David Stubbs
further expands on the theme. I’ve also been listening to the No Wave artists
that immediately preceded and inspired Sonic Youth, like Glenn Branca, and Rhys
Chatham, whose ‘Guitar Trio’ (composed in 1977) was performed numerous times in
the ferocious underground venues of late 70s-early 80s New York.
While I’ll be going more into No Wave and all
this un-rocking in my book, what has
started to fascinate me is deconstruction itself, and how it seems a
fundamental principle of [post-rock]. When I tossed off that phrase in my last
blog post, perhaps I unconsciously had in mind something Rudy Tambala said to me:
We didn’t want a
guitar to sound like a fucking guitar. And I think that song [‘Sulliday’]
really encapsulates it. You might think that’s
a power chord, but it’s not, it’s just smashing a guitar against something,
dropping it, and then going over and having a smoke, or whatever. But it was
really, let’s try and tear away, aggressively, any aspect of rock and roll. […]
There was this desire to destroy, even the groove. I think eventually we ended
up thinking we’ll keep the groove, keep the bassline, even if we deconstruct
it, keep the groove going, and just go fucking out there.
What is deconstruction? Let’s turn to the
Sonic Youth of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida.
From the moment
that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.
We are all trapped by this, us poor sheep;
we’re only able to create or analyse anything through ‘signs’ – which dominate
everything from language to the unconscious – and think in set responses that (a)
predate our existence and that (b) we’ve internalized throughout our lives. Signs
are not a route to free expression, but a limiter of it; words, for example,
only work in relation to other words. The idea of ‘logic’ dominates Western
thought and shoehorns us tighter into those expected channels.
Deconstruction – as I understand it – isn’t
just about fervently searching for
these signs then, when we find them, holding up our hands and thinking ‘oh
well, life’s a done deal’ (see Structuralism). Instead, deconstruction says
that we have to look, and look really fucking hard, for everything dictating
our responses. But another mode of seeing is possible. And once we’ve accepted that we have to go back to the
roots of everything to find this new way, then we can deconstruct those signs, those structures.
In short, deconstruction doesn’t destroy,
with all the nihilism that implies; instead, it studiously takes apart,
analyses, and then carefully, radically (and threateningly) reorders, using the same materials.
This is highly relevant for [post-rock]
guitar, but it’s also an underlying theme in numerous other aspects of the
[post-rock] sound and aesthetic. What I’m finding as a recurrent topic in my
interviews is a fixation on destroying
cliché. And it’s waaaaaaay more than just the usual ‘we’re doing things a
bit differently’ statement within every musician's interview arsenal. The torturous
recording process of many key albums bears testament to this.
The first time
something is played it is at its finest, and the minute you try to recreate
that it becomes an imitation of something that was originally better. But… the
problem with a lot of improvisation is that it meanders away from the point too
much. So the thing that this time [studio sessions for Laughing Stock lasted for seven months] afforded us was to go in
with people that we wanted to play with almost from an attitude point of view,
give them absolute freedom in terms of what they play, so that everything they
do play is free form, but then to construct an arrangement by taking little
sections of that and building that up from there. But that takes a large amount
of time because… ninety per cent of what you play will be rubbish. If you’re
improvising, if you get 10 per cent which is any good then I think you’re doing
really well. I think you’re doing amazingly well if you get half a percent!
There’s plenty of other gold in the
deconstruction hills (challenges to authority; listener comprehension; critical
interaction) that need a lot more thought on my part, but with a pretty free July, I’ve
got time to give it. And although I’m bastardising Derrida’s notions somewhat (or
rather ‘deconstructing’ them HAHAHAHA) to help interpret the works I’m
considering – I think, after months and months, I’ve found the first definite
thread bringing my [post-rock] peeps together.
That it’s a subversive and nebulous one in
itself is entirely, entirely fitting.
The image at the start of this post is from the installation Six String Sonics by Gil Kuno (2011). In this fully playable sculpture, Kuno reconstituted each of the usual six guitar strings into a separate instrument,
effectively making six guitars with one string each, which can be played
simultaneously by six musicians. More information, and watch/listen here.
